We caught up with Arthur Katz, Chief Investment Officer at OneAsset, during EthCC to discuss this exact challenge. We talked about how his team is actively addressing the liquidity issue and bringing commercial real estate into the global digital economy. With over a decade of experience in venture capital, commercial real estate, and digital assets, Arthur offers a unique perspective. Having supported unicorns like Stripe and Algolia while managing family office real estate portfolios, he gains a deep understanding of the distinct risk profiles across various asset classes. At OneAsset, he actively ensures that only pristine, high-quality assets are tokenised onchain, safeguarding users from platforms that treat Web3 as a dumping ground for unsellable properties.
Real estate is the world's largest asset class, yet it remains painfully illiquid and inaccessible to the average person. Investors are often locked into long fund cycles or forced to navigate complex, slow-moving property sales.
Read our conversation below to learn how he is applying rigorous institutional standards to tokenised real estate.
You have been in crypto since 2013 and spent just as long in real estate. What problems in property markets convinced you that tokenisation is the fix?
The main issue is liquidity. Real estate assets are inherently illiquid due to their structural characteristics. You either invest through a fund and wait for a full cycle to recover your money, or you sell the property outright.
Selling takes time, regardless of motivation, due to country-specific legal frameworks and deal structures.
Tokenisation significantly enhances the liquidity and speed of asset transfers. That is the most substantial improvement RWA offers to real estate.
You backed Stripe and Algolia before they became household names. How does the risk profile of a tokenised commercial property compare to an early-stage venture bet?
They belong to entirely different categories. Venture capital is binary; you either achieve a massive return or end up with nothing. To succeed in VC, you need to invest in many companies, make bold bets, be contrarian, and focus on the numbers.
If you do not invest in enough companies, your chances of recouping your money approach zero. Commercial real estate risk is entirely different. First, you have a yield. Even if the property does not appreciate as quickly as you would like, you are still earning rent regularly.
Second, properties very rarely disappear. Startups can fail for reasons no due diligence could have foreseen. Real estate provides tangible, enduring value and strong capital preservation.
The timeframe also varies considerably. A VC fund locks you in for seven to ten years, whereas you are not required to hold commercial real estate for that long.
Having participated in over a hundred early-stage deals and managed commercial real estate portfolios, what criteria must a tokenised property meet to pass the same due diligence as in traditional markets?
The underlying asset undergoes the same due diligence whether it is tokenised or not. What is added on top is the legal layer. We assess the legal framework surrounding the token and verify that the vehicle genuinely owns the asset.
We also ensure that the asset is retained and that proceeds flow back to the investor if the property is sold. This is the only incremental difference in due diligence between conventional commercial real estate and the tokenised version.
The answer to that incremental question depends heavily on regulation. Navigating strong regulatory frameworks is challenging and costly. However, it provides the absolute certainty that what you’re investing in is authentic.
A good yield is easy to pitch, but when you factor in property management fees, vacancy rates, FX costs, and platform fees, which figures truly represent value at OneAsset, and how does that compare to a traditional commercial property investment?
At OneAsset, we only communicate in net figures. I don't care if a property shows a 15% gross return if, after fees, you are receiving only 6%. The only number that matters to the investor is what they actually receive, and we communicate that transparently.
You should also remember that yield is just one variable. In this asset class, property appreciation also matters. Sometimes you will find an asset with a lower yield but strong projected appreciation, and other times you’ll find the opposite.
The right answer is always a balance between the two. As a general principle, wherever the risk is higher, the reward will be higher somewhere within the structure.
Is OneAsset building toward a diversified multi-property vault structure, or will the model always be single-asset vaults so investors can construct their own exposure?
We believe investors should build their own exposure. Our default approach is to focus on single economic units, though not necessarily single titles. For instance, an office building with four parking spaces might have five separate legal titles, but it operates as a single economic unit.
We package those cohesive units as a single token. We do plan to introduce pooled vaults in the future, but we are extremely cautious about how those are structured.
We explicitly avoid the practice of bundling strong assets with weak ones to shift inventory. That approach is common in traditional real estate securitisation, and we refuse to partake in it.
Traditional real estate valuation is periodic, with quarterly appraisals and no real-time prices. OneAsset uses Tokenised Asset Value alongside Gross Asset Value to offer continuous onchain pricing. How does this affect an investor managing a position?
I approach price discovery and secondary market liquidity with cautious optimism. If investors can rebalance their positions, exit when necessary, and buy over shorter time horizons, we will see an open market with prices established in real time. Order books for real estate will eventually follow suit.
We have intentionally designed our yield distribution to support this. We distribute yield daily instead of on a fixed schedule. This prevents the typical pattern of buying before a yield distribution date and selling the day after.
That pattern creates artificial price spikes. At OneAsset, you can claim your yield daily. You are never stuck waiting for a distribution event, and you can sell whenever you wish because your accrued yield is already claimable.
DefiLlama currently tracks 13 tokenised real estate assets, of which only one provides an attestation record for compliance purposes. Where does OneAsset stand, and what does a proper attestation look like for tokenised real estate?
Honestly, it's hard to see how anyone can invest in an asset without that documentation. At the very least, you need proof that the vehicle owns the property. That is simply essential, but we aim to go much further.
We are currently collaborating with one of the top global insurers to develop insurance products specifically for real estate RWAs. The insurer will independently confirm the existence of the underlying asset.
If the asset ever disappears, the investor is fully compensated. That is the next layer of protection the market desperately needs and largely lacks right now.
What are the biggest risks if attestations remain absent across the market?
You end up investing in empty shells. If there is no attestation confirming that the underlying asset is genuinely owned by the token structure, the system becomes entirely vulnerable.
Anyone can claim ownership of a landmark building and just take the money, which is a simple form of fraud. Currently, the market has very few protections against this.
How do you see real estate onchain in five years?
We must separate residential and commercial properties because they serve distinctly different asset classes. Residential real estate is culturally resistant to change, with a deeply ingrained belief in owning the place where you live.
That cultural shift will take significantly longer than five years. Commercial real estate tells a completely different story. The way companies account for investments and the sheer cost of buying and selling commercial assets heavily encourage flexible ownership structures.
In five to ten years, it will be completely normal for an office, a farm, or a clinic to be a token held by hundreds of thousands of people.
Will tokenisation lower barriers between countries? Currently, investing from France into Italian property involves banking complexity, regulatory friction, and market opacity. Does tokenisation foster a more harmonised global market?
Absolutely. From a regulatory standpoint, it is already achievable today. At OneAsset, we have a KYC process and a list of excluded jurisdictions, mainly sanctioned countries. Beyond those restrictions, investors can access assets worldwide from the very first day.
Tokenisation changes beyond legal access are purely informational. In a typical cross-border purchase, you need to visit the property and accept that you might not fully understand local liquidity conditions well enough to exit safely.
Onchain, the liquidity is entirely transparent. The history is verifiable, and you have a real-time view of market conditions across weeks, months, and years. This fundamentally alters the calculus for cross-border investment.
Do you believe in DeFi built on top of RWA? And what excites you most about where RWAfi goes from here?
The token unlocks mechanisms that were simply impossible before. The clearest example is using your property tokens as collateral for a loan. In traditional finance, this is a slow, document-heavy process known as a Lombard loan.
Onchain, you transfer your tokens as collateral, receive capital immediately, and easily retrieve your collateral upon repayment. We can take that even further with flash loans on real estate.
Requesting a bank loan that only takes a few seconds is impossible. In DeFi, it serves as a real financial primitive. Innovative developers will explore these capabilities in ways we haven't anticipated, making the protocols built on real-estate RWAs incredibly exciting.
Is there anything else you would like to add that we haven't covered?
Many platforms in the tokenised real estate sector are operated by individuals from the traditional industry who possess extensive inventories of assets they cannot sell offchain.
They are turning to RWA solely because they see it as a means of rebranding to shift assets that failed in traditional markets. This causes three major issues for the ecosystem.
First, if those poor-quality assets are sold onchain, investors will lose money and blame the infrastructure, harming the entire sector. Second, flooding the market with low-grade assets makes it very challenging to find truly good ones.
Third, the platforms engaging in this often have the most superficial credibility because they have established contractor relationships and recognisable industry names behind them. Trust is everything in crypto. The sector must be rigorous about what gets put onchain.